own kind, and was at home with them. And indeed his stock might well go back to just such stubborn settlers, survivors after the death of this city, the offspring of time-expired legionaries and the daughters of enterprising local middlemen. Deprived of their urban background, they had rooted into the valley earth and turned to stock and crops for a living. And survived. Tenacious and long-memoried, they had not allowed themselves to be uprooted or changed a second time.
George stopped the car at the edge of the drive, and walked back. He stood watching beside the flower-beds; and after a long minute of uninterrupted work, Orrie straightened his long, athlete’s back again, and turned towards his audience the massive, stony beauty of his face, flushed with exertion. At this range the flaws that reduced him to humanity, and a fairly limited humanity at that, were plain to be seen: the stubble of coarse reddish beard he hadn’t bothered to shave, the roughness of his weathered skin over the immaculate but brutal bones, the inlaid indifference of the blue eyes.
‘Good morning!’ said George. ‘Nice show of bulbs you’ve got coming along.’
‘Not bad, I reckon,’ the gardener admitted. ‘Be some tulips out by now if it’d bin a bit warmer. You come round in three weeks or so, they’ll be a show worth seeing.’
George offered his cigarette case and a light. Both were accepted tacitly but promptly. ‘You take care of all this place single-handed? That’s a lot of work for one.’
‘I manage,’ said Orrie, and looked with quickening curiosity through the smoke of his cigarette into George’s face. ‘You’re police, aren’t you? I saw you once when you picked up that chap who was firing ricks, up the valley.’
‘That’s right. My name’s Felse. You’ll have heard we fished a young fellow out of the Comer this morning?’ Everyone with an ear to the ground in Moulden had heard the news before ever the police surgeon reached the spot. ‘He was here with a visiting school party yesterday. You had to chase him off from where you were cordoning off the slip. That was the last you saw of him?’
‘Last I
There were interesting implications here, if Orrie wasn’t imagining the prying fingers; as why should he? He wasn’t the imaginative kind, and a man does know how he puts down his own tools. The orchard lay well back from the riverside, and the wealth of old and well-grown trees between isolated it from the house. Gerry Boden had last been seen alive strolling negligently along the garden hedge, and somewhere along the course of that hedge he had vanished. Now if there should be a hole, or a thin place, inviting him through into the plenteous cover of the orchard, and the solitary shed in its far corner…
‘You don’t lock that shed?’
‘It’s got no lock. I keep thinking I’ll put a padlock on, but I never get round to it. Him,’ he said, with a jerk of his head towards Paviour’s house, ‘he’s always scared of having things pinched, but the stuff in there’s mine, no skin off his nose. Folks are pretty honest round here, I’m not worried. I do me own repairs—make me own spares when I need ’em.’
‘And there’s nothing missing this time?’
‘Not a thing, far’s I can see. Just somebody was in there, poking around, shifting things, passing the time nosing into everything, and thinking he’d put it all back the way it was before. Which you can’t do. Not to kid the one who uses the place regularly.’
‘You didn’t say anything about this to Detective-Sergeant Price.’
‘I didn’t know, did I? I hadn’t been back here. I only went into the place twenty minutes ago.’
‘Fair enough,’ said George. ‘How about coming down there with me now? No need to disturb the household, if we can come round to it from the other side.’
There was a navigable track that circled the perimeter, and brought the car round to the other side of the curator’s house and garden by inconspicuous ways. The shed was of wood, a compact, dark, creosoted building tucked into the corner of the shrubbery. Inside it smelled of timber and peat and wood-shavings. Various small packets and bottles and tins lay neatly but grimily along shelves on one side, folded sacks were piled in a corner, and full sacks stacked along the base of the wall. Under the single window was Orrie’s work-bench, a vice clamped to the edge of it, and a rack of tools arranged under the window-sill. He was comprehensively equipped—power drill, sets of spanners, sets of screwdrivers, planes, even a small modern lathe. In the fine litter of sawdust and shavings under the bench the morning light found a few abrupt blue glitters of metal.
George advanced only just within the doorway, and looked round him. There was dust and litter enough on the concreted floor to have preserved the latest traces of feet, though it was clearly swept reasonably often. And if Orrie had not already tramped all over it this morning, since his discovery, nosing out the signs of trespass, there just might be something to be found.
‘Did you move about much in here when you came in and realised you’d had an intruder?’
‘Didn’t have time. I never went no further than you are now, all I come for was my little secateurs, and they were on the shelf here inside the door. I reckoned I’d come back midday and have a look over everything, but I don’t think there’ll be anything missing. Yes, I did go a bit towards the window and had a quick glance round. That’s all.’
‘Then what made you so sure somebody’d been in? You were talking about something more than just a feeling.’
‘That!’ said Orrie succinctly, and pointed a large brown forefinger at the top right corner of the window, where his periodic cleaning had not bothered to extend its sweep.
He wasn’t clairvoyant, after all; he hadn’t even needed the tidy workman’s hypersensitive unease over his tools. In the small triangle of dust the tip of a finger had written plainly GB, and jabbed a plump round fullstop after the letters. The human instinct to perpetuate one’s own name at every opportunity, whenever more urgent occupation is wanting, had made use even of this mere three square inches of dusty glass. The act cast a sharp sidelight of acute intelligence upon Orrie’s remark about passing the time.
‘There’s the way things are lying, too,’ conceded Orrie, ‘but that was what took my eye right off.’
